INTERNATIONAL RELEASE Film keeps focus on enlightenment

Not all audiences will appreciate Kim Ki-duk's style.
By PHILIP KENNICOTT
WASHINGTON POST
"Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring" is brutal about serenity. Its goal, so much more ambitious than most movies, is a spiritual awareness that transcends the material world. But it requires, first and foremost, submission from its audience.
The way to enlightenment is neither fast nor painless, and the film demonstrates this through an almost total lack of the usual niceties of film as entertainment -- plot, brisk pacing and titillation -- and through sudden, disturbing bursts of passion and violence that are, for being brief and entirely unexpected, more wrenching than the blood and gore of Hollywood fare. It is the ninth film from the 43-year-old Korean director Kim Ki-duk, and it is emerging from the world of film festivals for what will almost certainly be a brief-but-distinguished commercial release.
Set almost entirely at a floating, one-room monastery on a lake (filmed in a heartbreakingly beautiful nature preserve in Korea), it follows the chapters of life, the spiritual awakening and trial of a young monk, and the generational succession of hard-won wisdom.
Modest plot
The film opens with an ominous promise of thin Buddhist gruel. A wise old master (Oh Young-soo) and his young charge (Kim Jong-ho) commune with nature. But no, it won't go down the pop-enlightenment route, with vague bromides of discipline and blankness ("the way is many, young grasshopper"). It takes a knife to its own reverie, and the boy's cruel behavior is compensated with a cruel lesson. The epiphany, which leaves the child inconsolable over the death of a snake, is wrenching.
The child grows into adolescence, and just as the world of others pierces the adolescent (with desire, aggression, ambition), so too the world of contemporary life pierces the idyll on the lake. When the child enters, wearing everyday street clothes, the movie offers another jolt. No, this isn't a timeless fantasy; this world is connected to our world. With sex, explicitly depicted, the world of man is connected with the world of animals far more frankly and truthfully than the romanticized movie sex of half-obscured bodies, low lighting and gauzy focus.
Unexpected aspects
Though lacking in any particular narrative surprise, the film nevertheless takes the viewer completely by surprise several times. Using vignettes with storybook predictability, Kim develops his characters, encompasses the complexity of human life, and maintains an uninterrupted visual purity. The floating monastery strikes one, at first, as far too empty a stage for a movie of any length, but it becomes, in the end, a meditation on walls, rules and memory, and on the keeping out and the keeping in of life.
Can it be recommended without reservation? No. It isn't flawless, and when Kim enters the film as an actor (playing the young boy grown to middle age), the symbolic density tests the patience. There are moments that are saccharine. The music is amateurish. The simplicity will be comforting to some, infuriating to others. It is a film best seen alone.
And if one is immune to the spell of nature, it will seem like 100 minutes of meaningless incantation. Of course, if one is immune to the spell of nature, the disease that "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring" seeks to cure is, for you, probably terminal.